Ailish Brennan, who served as our Executive Director since 2019 wrote the following piece where she explains what it is like to live in fear of violence as a transgender person and a traumatic experience she had a week before she made the extremely difficult decision to resign from Youth RISE.
The dangers and trauma from simply existing as a trans person is something I am acutely aware of. I experience it, talk about it, witness it and read about it. There is a constant, lingering, unwilling awareness of it. That doesn’t make it any easier. I found myself in the emergency room last week seeing psychiatric medical attention. This is something I, like most people, wanted to avoid. I tried to avoid experiencing this and the fears and reservations I had were realized before I had even seen a doctor.
We arrived in the evening and were put in a waiting room by ourselves through a set of doors. Other people slowly trickled in, usually accompanied by two police officers who had brought them from wherever they’d been spending the evening consuming some substance. They were usually harmless and unthreatening with the Polizei presence usually causing me more anxiety than the people they had brought.
Eventually a rowdy middle aged German man came in with some questionable (at best) tattoos. He was placed directly across from us and left there chatting away to nobody in particular. Despite our best efforts he inevitably turned his attention towards us and as we ignored him he walked over so it was no longer possible to avoid him. He got increasingly aggressive and began shouting transphobic and homophobic tirades at us. Hannah pushed him away and brought me over to another seat. I am so grateful they came with me.
Now sat away from each other but still very much in sight your man kept to himself for a few minutes. He tried to lie down across the seats but struggled to get comfortable due to the massive lump protruding from the back of his head which he seemed unaware of. Lying there across from me was his bald head dangling over the armrest of the last chair in the row, at a perfect height to catch it on the volley. The regular presence of the uniformed fascists with the power to arrest me for assaulting this bald fascist across from me made me think better of that temptation.
Throughout all of this we were almost alone in the room, with doctors sometimes passing through and at this stage just one other person waiting who hadn’t so much as looked up since he arrived. I was extremely aware of the nearest (and only) way to exit the waiting room. I had already looked for all of the exits the moment that I sat down in that room. To come in through this door there was a button on the wall that you pressed to open. Within the waiting room however there was no such button and in its place a keypad, the only way of opening this door which kept us locked in the room with him.
This part of the story feels particularly outrageous – after seeking psychiatric care I have ended up locked in a room with Hannah and a fascist.
After spewing a mix of transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia and racism to nobody in particular he eventually stood up and started directing his anger back at us. As he walked towards us, directly between us and this locked exit, Hannah confronted him again and he started to back us into a corner before they pushed him away, unfortunately catching his own fall and stumbling back rather than landing on that same spot on the back of his head again.
We quickly headed towards the exit and tried to get the attention of literally anyone to open it for us. It opened as he stood there, exposing himself, and shouting that we just need a real man to make us straight. A weirdly affirming moment throughout this as I experienced regular misogyny instead of the usual transmisogyny.
The door eventually opened and I spoke to a doctor, the first time I had gotten to speak to one about my mental health, and explained that this experience has been largely extremely damaging to my mental health and overall wellbeing. He told us to wait outside and eventually came out to ask me some questions and hand me a piece of paper containing the phone numbers of hotlines to call in case of a psychiatric emergency. These were almost all numbers we knew, phone numbers we had rang earlier but did not get an answer.
Despite the severity of this particular situation it is not even surprising to me. This experience is in line with the experiences of accessing healthcare or even simply existing in this world as a trans woman. Violence is part of the trans* experience. Violence can happen on the train, in a nightclub, in a hospital waiting room. Even in a hospital we are not guaranteed safety.
This lack of safety in a medical setting is actually consistent with my past experiences of accessing healthcare. Whether it be physical violence, sexual violence, or institutional violence; the violence is constant. The violence we experience is constant even in Germany, even in Berlin, a place I choose to live in because it is still more accepting of trans people than most of the world. Trans* people around the world experience violence much more severe than this, caught in wars involving two countries and militaries who have no interest in protecting them, in countries with harsh restrictions on our existence and where we are forced into the margins. Yet everywhere, the violence is constant.